If you build a web site, they will come — as long as they know how to find you. Google and other search engines learn what is on the Internet by sending an army of “bots” to crawl through the web and send back reports on what they have found. The bots are programmed to notice certain kinds of web pages and ignore others. A new Expert Voices blog invites the NSDL community to improve the rankings of its web pages by sharing what they have learned about search engine optimization (SEO).

Last summer, NSDL staffers found that Google’s bots are unusually fond of NSDL’s Expert Voices blog pages (see the report). The bots often discover new Expert Voices posts within a hour of their posting. Even better, the discovery bot usually sends a second bot to crawl through the post in more detail, “digest” its contents (including web links), and send the results back to the master computer at Google headquarters. Why are the bots so fond of us? One reason is that the people at Google know that NSDL offers highly useful web resources for free. Another is that NSDL pages are often linked to other posts of similarly high quality. So we start with a big advantage.

Search engine optimization is a large and complex topic, but a few rules stand out. One is using a high-quality blog that links to your web pages. Another is using the right titles, tags, and descriptions in the HTML headers that accompany every web page. Bots see these things first, starting with the title. So if the title of the page does not specifically mention the key ideas in the page’s contents, the contents are likely to remain invisible to the bots. Following a few simple rules can dramatically improve the search ranking of a site, and our new blog is a good place to start learning those rules.